In the field of European studies, the notion of ‘differentiated integration’ (Stubb 1996) was developed in the late 1990s as an alternative to the crude membership/non-membership dichotomy. While the theoretical benefits of this approach are broadly discussed in the existing literature, further empirical studies have been deemed necessary (Holzinger and Schimmelfennig 2012). The Nordic states constitute a particularly interesting laboratory in order to study this phenomenon. Indeed, while these states share several socio-economic and political characteristics, they also differ in terms of their relationship with the European Union. Several studies on these relationships emphasise the relevance of certain contextual variables as key explanatory factors for the variation in attitudes between the Nordic states. However, there is also lack of analysis that looks into the domestic political features that these countries share. Furthermore, most studies in the field tend to ignore the respective government’s positions on European integration, and mostly adopt a top-down approach when focusing on the nation-state as a whole. Adopting a most similar systems design, this thesis aims to answer the following question: have Nordic government preferences on European integration been influenced by domestic political factors? In order to answer this question, four domestic variables are introduced and analysed: relative strength of parties in parliament; composition of government; type of government; and government ideology. Within this comparative framework, three Nordic countries have been selected: the first one belonging to the ‘inner core’ of the European Union (Finland);; while the second is located at its ‘outer core’ (Sweden);; and the third one serves as a control case as an ‘EU-outsider’ which is still located in the Union’s ‘inner periphery’ (Norway). For each state, the analysis starts in the early 1990s, when ‘Europe’ developed into a politically salient issue in domestic politics. The focus is furthermore set on their respective government’s positions regarding five distinct policy areas: participation in the European Economic Area; application for European Union membership; participation in the Schengen Area; participation in the Economic and Monetary Union; and participation in European Battle Groups. The main findings of the thesis suggest that when analysing governments’ positions on (differentiated) European integration, the domestic political features should not be downplayed. For instance, the Swedish government’s opposition to participation in the EMU in 1997 is mostly explained by a lack of party consensus over this issue, unlike in Finland where a broad inter-party agreement was secured for this policy area. The analysis further suggests that studies on party and government preferences on Europe should focus on policy areas rather than on the issue of integration as a whole. Such a focus provides for better understanding of the nature of ‘Euroscepticism’ in the Nordic region and, to a broader extent, in Europe.

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disorder that is characterised by uncontrollable shaking, muscular rigidity and cognitive impairment, due to low levels of dopamine caused by loss of dopamine containing neurons (DCN). The loss of DCN has been strongly associated with Caspase mediated apoptotic death. At present there are many studies that indicate exercise is beneficial in PD treatment, but there is a lack of research exploring the potential pathways, which exercise can activate and suppress to provide such positive and even negative effects. This study is the first to explore the effect of treadmill exercise on the level of Caspases, along with CAMK-IV protein in different brain regions of MPTP-treated rat model, using WB analysis. The results of this research has demonstrated reduction or completely suppression of some active Caspases, as well as, elevated amount of CAMK-IV in different brain regions of exercised PD animal model. To determine how exercise is reducing and inhibiting activation of Caspases, the first step was to identify how Caspases are stimulated, using ReNcell VM stem cell line that had been differentiated and treated with 6OHDA. The results of the study demonstrated 6OHDA triggered Caspase mediated apoptotic death of dDCN via PERK ER stress and NFκB classical pathway. IF, WB and cell viability analysis, using a wide range of inhibitors, showed that Caspase-2 is activated by the PERK pathway of ER stress and NFB classical pathway in 6OHDA treated dDCN. 6OHDA triggered activation of Caspase- 8 by the classical pathway in NFB mediated death of dDCN. 6OHDA triggered Caspase-4 activation but the exact mechanism involved remains to be identified. Only through understanding the molecular pathways regulating death of DCN in PD, new potential targets for therapy may be identified, which may ultimately reduce further death of DCN and slow PD progression. This proposed study has the potential to seek for more efficient drugs, which can suppress Caspase activation by targeting key targets in the pathways that the Caspases follow. These new specific targeted drugs could be used with treadmill exercise to achieve maximum effect, by slowing down or inhibiting further death of DCN.

The first differentiated tax policies for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in South Africa were introduced in 2001. Several relief measures have followed, the most recent being the introduction in the 2008/9 budget of a presumptive turnover tax system and venture capital incentives for investments in high-growth and high-tech SMEs. The present study uses a qualitative systematic literature review to assess the effectiveness of using differentiated tax policies to address the constraints that have been imposed on South African SMEs. It draws on international experiences in the use of differentiated tax policies to address constraints imposed on SMEs. Thereafter it focuses on differentiated tax policies in South Africa and considers the effectiveness of using differentiated tax policies to address constraints that have been imposed on SMEs. Research in other countries indicates that when differentiated tax policies are used in isolation, they are not very successful in bringing about changes in the level of entrepreneurial activity. However, these policies can assist in creating an environment that is conducive to the growth of SMEs and can alleviate the constraints faced by SMEs. The effectiveness of differentiated tax policies in the alleviation of the constraints imposed on small and medium enterprises can be improved by means of various non-tax policy measures. The National Treasury has used differentiated tax policies to target two specific constraints for SMEs, namely access to equity finance and easing of the tax compliance burden. This study concludes that the current differentiated tax policies for small and medium enterprises that are articulated in tax legislation do not address the constraints identified by the National Treasury effectively. The findings of this study cast doubt on the ability of the differentiated tax policies in South Africa to alleviate the constraints that SMEs face in this country. Furthermore, it poses the question whether the main objective of the policies is not to collect more revenue by broadening the tax base. The study focuses on the differentiated tax policies that came into effect before August 2008. The effectiveness of the differentiated tax policies that were proposed in the 2008/2009 budget (venture capital incentives and presumptive turnover tax) will depend on the details of the tax legislation that is promulgated. Future research could determine the effectiveness of these differentiated tax policies in addressing the constraints with which SMEs are faced. Copyright / Dissertation (MCom)--University of Pretoria, 2009. / Taxation / unrestricted

The Internet supports a diverse number of applications, which have different requirements for a number of services. Next generation networks provide high speed connectivity between hosts, which leaves the service provider to configure network devices appropriately, in order to maximize network performance. Service provider settings are based on best recommendation parameters, which give an opportunity to optimize these settings even further. This dissertation focuses on a packet discarding algorithm, known as random early detection (RED), to determine parameters which will maximize utilization of a resource. The two dominant traffic protocols used across an IP backbone are UDP and TCP. UDP traffic flows transmit packets regardless of network conditions, dropping packets without changing its transmission rates. However, TCP traffic flows concern itself with the network condition, reducing its packet transmission rate based on packet loss. Packet loss indicates that a network is congested. The sliding window concept, also known as the TCP congestion window, adjusts to the amount of acknowledgements the source node receives from the destination node. This paradigm provides a means to transmit data across the available bandwidth across a network. A well known and widely implemented simulation environment, the network simulator 2 (NS2), was used to analyze the RED mechanism. The network simulator 2 (NS2) software gained its popularity as being a complex networking simulation tool. Network protocol traffic (UDP and TCP) characteristics comply with theory, which verifies that the traffic generated by this simulator is valid. It is shown that the autocorrelation function differs between these two traffic types, verifying that the generated traffic does conform to theoretical and practical results. UDP traffic has a short-range dependency while TCP traffic has a long-range dependency. Simulation results show the effects of the RED algorithm on network traffic and equipment performance. It is shown that random packet discarding improves source transmission rate stabilization, as well as node utilization. If the packet dropping probability is set high, the TCP source transmission rates will be low, but a low packet drop probability provides high transmission rates to a few sources and low transmission rates to the majority of other sources. Therefore, an ideal packet drop probability was obtained to complement TCP source transmission rates and node utilization. Statistical distributions were fitted to sampled data from the simulations, which also show improvements to the network with random packet discarding. The results obtained contribute to congestion control across wide area networks. Even though a number of queuing management implementation exists, RED is the most widely used implementation used by service providers. / Dissertation (MEng)--University of Pretoria, 2013. / Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering / unrestricted

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Classrooms in Sweden are heterogeneous and this is acknowledged in the curriculum, stating that all students have an equal right to education at their own level. Teachers must, therefore, design their teaching plan taking this into account. Previous investigations have shown that the Swedish schools do not fulfill this completely for advanced students. The objective of this study was to examine how Swedish teachers differentiate their English as foreign language (EFL) lessons to reach the advanced English students in the lower grades, what challenges they experiences and how they assess the students’ learning outcomes. Information was obtained through a survey and semi-structured interviews with preschool class and grade 1-3 teachers. The survey and question about participation in an interview, was emailed to schools in 74 randomly chosen municipalities all across Sweden. A total of 156 answers to the survey and five interviews are included in the analyses. The results show that the majority of teachers with experience of advanced students differentiate instruction, by using several different strategies; they experience several challenges, the heterogeneous class room as the most common; and, they assess that differentiated instruction has a small positive effect on the advanced students’ learning outcomes in general.

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Quality of service (QoS) is an important consideration in networking, but it is also a significant challenge. Providing QoS guarantees becomes even more challenging when you add the complexities to the network like voice and video applications. This master's thesis focuses on QoS modeling and simulation in discrete event simulation system OMNeT++. The implementation of multiple techniques for QoS simulation is added to OMNeT++ within this work. All implemented modules are validated against the QoS tools on real routers. The last part of the work presents the possibility of QoS simulation in newly implemented modules.

Information about the differentiated services (DiffServ), the link failure problems and the alternate routes in a DiffServ domain finding are the aims of the master´s thesis to be given. Properties of the differentiated services, the usage of marking techniques in the DiffServ domain are described in the thesis. The concept of the DiffServ domain, its structure and mostly used today routing protocol OSPF are described too. The function model of the DiffServ domain has been created in the simulation environment called Opnet Modeleler on the basis of the obtained knowledge. The link failure and the following link recovery have been simulated in the model and the effects have been analyzed after that.

Master 's thesis deals about computer networks, which constitutes a global communication structure and play a very important role in today's society. The rapid development of Internet, the emergence of new multimedia applications and their increasing use of calls to the efficient functioning of the creation of such governance mechanisms of transmission, which are able to secure the required parameters. The thesis deals about the issue of quality of service (QoS) in IP networks. It presents the basic characteristics and requirements of these networks for the transmission of sensitive data by the quality of services, deals with the QoS definition, and describes the essential parameters to be followed to achieve the required quality of service in practical deployment. In addition, lists the various principles and options to ensure QoS in computer networks. Generally, it represents the Cisco 1841 router features and options to ensure quality of service in the network based on these routers. Practical thesis part provides two types of model IP networks, which were designed in order to verify the impact of service quality in real practice. Of the known methods to ensure QoS, which include a mechanism of Integrated services, Differentiated services, it focus its content about the Differentiated Services and the implementation of these in proposed network model. The last part of the work presents the results obtained by the impact of quality of service for the applications and their assessment.